I burst into laughter.
“She meant it as a gift,” I said.
“How do you know?” Evan asked, turning toward me. He still looked amazed, but humor had started to tilt his mouth.
“I just know. She’s been collecting them ever since Noah died. I’d started to help her,” I said, reaching down into the pile and rustling the dry leaves. Each one was, of course, perfectly formed. Even though there was no logic to Lorraine’s gift, it made perfect sense to me.
I glanced over at Evan, who still looked bemused. I grabbed a handful of dry leaves and threw them at him.
“It doesn’t have to make sense, Evan,” I said, my laughter fading.
He just stood there for a few seconds, a crimson maple leaf clinging on the lapel of his funereal black suit jacket. His gaze narrowed on me. I felt a rush of heat through my body.
Then it was happening. I stepped into his arms, and his mouth was on mine, his kiss as possessive and wild as it had ever been. More so. And my response was even more passionate. I gave myself up to it, knowing only the full blast of my need for him could evaporate my doubts.
We fell onto the bed of leaves, all the guilt, anger, and uncertainty incinerated to dust. Evan gruffly declared his love for me between kisses and hungry bites on my neck. I declared
my love in return, my tone as desperate as my clawing hands. He slid my dress to my waist. I groaned, ecstasy and agony combined.
Our situation was impossibly complex and fraught with emotional entanglement. No one would believe our story, if I tried to explain.
But this?
This was simple.
It was then that I realized, in a sex-hazed sense, that Lorraine had fashioned a kind of primitive altar on that bed, a bower of honesty. She really had given us a gift.
But even as I submitted to the power of the moment, something whispered inside of me that it wouldn’t be enough.
Later, we showered together in the suite Evan had been using, and lay down on the soft, cool bed. I couldn’t stop touching him, my anxious fingertips scouting the planes and hollows of his body, as if I believed I could store up enough memories to last a lifetime. He, on the other hand, held me steady and fast against him, his strength the hallmark of his embrace.
“Evan?” I asked, my cheek against his solid chest.
“Hmmm?”
“Let’s say it was true, that Elizabeth came to me from… wherever she was,” I said, hesitating at voicing the clichés: the other side, heaven, purgatory, hell. “Do you think she could have been controlling me into doing what I did with Noah?”
“What do you think?”
I lifted my head to peer at his face. He watched me with solemn gravity.
“I think she influenced me, because she knew she could form a connection with me. I’m her daughter. Her sister,” I said the last experimentally, seeing how it felt on my tongue. It wasn’t as horrible as I’d imagined it would be. “She reached out to me because she could. Maybe it was the similarity of our genes, like Noah believed. Maybe it was karma. I don’t know for sure. I do know this. I did what I did because I chose to. I wanted to make Noah pay for what he’d done to her. To Lorraine. To you. Us.”
He merely nodded once in the pregnant pause that followed.
“I killed him,” I said to him for the first time. “You know that, don’t you?”
His hand moved, cupping my face tenderly. “No. I don’t know that. You were merely there to witness his lifetime of sins catching up to him.”
“I was the embodiment of his sins,” I said. “And I knew that when I went into that tunnel, Evan. He was the foulest thing I could ever imagine. But he was a human being. And I wanted him to suffer. I wanted him to pay. I pushed him until his heart gave out on him. And I’m going to have to live with that for the rest of my life.”
“Don’t, honey. Don’t make a choice to suffer. Choose not to carry this around for your whole life.” His thumb moved on my cheek. “You were innocent in all this, Anna.”
“I was innocent,” I said, my gaze touring his face. I had never loved him more than I did in that moment, when I knew for certain I’d lost him.
“Until I wasn’t anymore,” I whispered softly.
The next morning, I saw him enter the garage just as I was placing my suitcase in the car. I looked away from his face and slammed the trunk shut. I thought I’d seen hollow grief in his expression many times before, but that had been just a trace of what I saw now.